Content targeting has evolved significantly in terms of precision and ubiquity. For example, advertisers could perform a cursory analysis of a certain population to determine a general set of interests, and connect a product or service to those interests. Thus, a billboard advertisement at a sporting venue may involve snacks or beverages that sporting enthusiasts may typically enjoy while experiencing a match or game. Advertisers have also used applied psychology and behaviorism to construct advertisements that appeal to certain basic emotions of targeted consumers, such as love, hate, and fear. The extreme effectiveness of such techniques has led to pervasion of consumer advertising throughout nearly all cultures and societies in the world.
With the onset of the Internet, online advertising quickly evolved through a series of phases, such as early banner advertisements on websites, relentless pop-up advertisements over preferred content, pay-per-click revenue models, and eventually to more standardized HyperText Markup Language (HTML) constructs providing designated blocks for advertisement images, texts, animations, videos, and other content. Concurrently, app developers have utilized mobile advertising companies to insert advertisements through mobile device operating systems and web browsers. In addition, native or disguised advertising—which matches the form and function of the platform upon which it appears—has become more and more ubiquitous, purportedly offering a less intrusive user content browsing experience.
Browsers, search engines, and social media platforms continue to accumulate massive amounts of data for each user through browsing history, text parsing, associations with other users, and feedback information, in order to provide more narrowly targeted advertisements to users. These entities seek to determine user interests on an individualized and/or clustered level in order to provide narrowly targeted advertisements for those users. From a content-provider standpoint, advertisements have typically been used as a source of revenue and/or as an alternative revenue source to counter content subscriptions.